A human rights group wants your old USB drives to help overthrow Kim Jong Un

Have any spare USB memory sticks lying around? Human rights
campaigners want them as part of a new movement to beat the
foreign media blackout in North Korea and propaganda about the
West being spewed by Kim Jong-un's hermit regime.

It might seem like a very small thing to do,
but the Human Rights Foundation (HRF) and Silicon Valley
non-profit organization Forum 280 have launched the Flash Drives for Freedom
campaign, seeking as many working USB memory sticks
as possible.

The idea is to donate these memory sticks to
North Korean refugee-led organizations, who will fill the
drives with Western TV shows and films in order to dispel the
lies and illusions the regime tells its people – such as claims
that the West and South Korea are dangerous, hostile, poor and
vastly inferior to North Korea.

"You can be involved just by shipping a USB
drive to Palo Alto, and we'll help to get it sent to North
Korea. This is a viable technology that works there, that North
Koreans have decided is a way to reach people," HRF's chief
strategy officer Alex Gladstein told Wired. "Each one has
the potential to literally change someone's life."

At the moment, organisations made up of North
Koreans who have escaped to South Korea, like Fighters for a
Free North Korea (FFNK), North Korean Intellectual Solidarity
(NKIS) and the North Korean Strategy Center (NKSC),
collectively smuggle less than 10,000 USB memory sticks and SD
cards into North Korea each year, and they have to purchase the
devices at retail prices on the internet.

If people could donate the USB memory sticks,
these organisations could reach more people and expand their
work into sending real information and culture back to their
families, friends and neighbours, as the cost of bribes and
travel to North Korea, as well as focus groups with North
Korean refugees, gets expensive.

Interestingly, American shows like Friends and
Desperate Housewives have been found to be very popular.

HRF and Forum 280 plan to launch an Indiegogo
crowdfunding campaign in February and hope that Flash Drives
for Freedom will help raise awareness about their cause in the
tech industry, and perhaps lead to better ways to disseminate
information.